Emperor Notes

Product Lead (15y). Applying product strategy to stock analysis. Llong-term focus & data-driven swing trades. NOT FINANCIAL ADVISE.

[Emperor Notes @Emp_Notes]

Decided to play the Stock Draft on my end for fun. Here’s my list, with last Thursday’s closing prices:

$NBIS (286,69)
$HON (229,01)
$QXO (17,76)
$AVGO (411,35)
$GNRC (279,15)
$SOFI (17,91)
$EOSE (7,65)
$GLW (194,92)
$TSMC (462,12)
$RKLB (107,24)
$AAPL (298,01)
$CRWV (117,95)

[Emperor Notes @Emp_Notes]

@pepemoonboy @CaktusJxck deserves!

[Emperor Notes @Emp_Notes]

@al_antdp Se fosse ao contrário era a mesma coisa. O nível de debate e elevação sobre política (note-se que não estou a mencionar “em” política) esta arrantado para a lama por todos os pólos.
Sinais dos tempos e do debate arrastado para a rede social, sem factos, nem respeito.

[Emperor Notes @Emp_Notes]

@basispointpod Listening to it from here…

[Shay Boloor @StockSavvyShay]

UPDATED FIB LEVELS FOR POPULAR STOCKS

AI Utilities
• $IREN $31
• $NBIS $160
• $CIFR $17
• $CRWV $67

AI Power
• $EOSE $3
• $BE $192
• $NVTS $8
• $VRT $245

AI Connectivity
• $AVGO $368
• $ALAB $251
• $CRDO $183
• $MRVL $168

AI Hardware
• $NVDA $190
• $TSM $377
• $ASML $1,713
• $MU $672

AI Applications
• $PLTR $131
• $NOW $101
• $CRWD $196
• $SNOW $259

Physical AI
• $TSLA $369
• $AMZN $245
• $GOOGL $335
• $VPG $84

Space
• $RKLB $56
• $ASTS $47
• $PL $20
• $RDW $8

Quantum
• $IONQ $26
• $RGTI $13
• $QBTS $16
• $INFQ $8

Drones
• $ONDS $6
• $AVAV $99
• $KTOS $42
• $MRCY $92

Nuclear
• $OKLO $33
• $UUUU $8
• $GEV $906
• $LEU $132

Photonics
• $AAOI $87
• $LITE $636
• $COHR $311
• $AEHR $66

CPU Bottleneck
• $AMD $467
• $INTC $88
• $ARM $242
• $AMKR $57

[Emperor Notes @Emp_Notes]

@RealMattMoney I just keep driving my 95 E36 and put all the money into $RKLB.

[Emperor Notes @Emp_Notes]

Memory is massive, but the NEXT big theme? Custom ASIC design & AI power grid logistics. Hard to run AI without energy.
I’ll keep on adding to my position in $NEXT for example… 🤪

[Paper Gains @PaperGainsInc]

FAM... LOOK AROUND.

$AAPL $MSFT $META down

$MU $NVDA $GLW the whole AI complex immediately up

Looks like they're rotating out of the rotation 🤪

My question is... Will it be memory again? I'm comfortable with the AI picks and shovels in general.

What's the NEXT big theme?

[Parkash Heerani @HeeraniPK]

People have short memories.

Last November, $RKLB fell ~50%, from around $73 to $37. X was full of posts saying it was over. "It'll never make new ATHs." "Starship will kill the launch market." "Neutron is delayed and will be irrelevant."

About 60 days later, $RKLB was back at all-time highs.

If the stock price is bothering you more than the business itself, you're probably living on borrowed conviction from other people.

An investor should never live on borrowed conviction.

Why panic now that the stock is already down 50%, when the business continues to improve?

Space Systems, which generates ~70% of revenue, is still growing 40-50% YoY. Neutron is closer than it's ever been. A single successful Neutron launch is expected to generate approximately eight times the revenue of an Electron launch.

The Iridium acquisition is a major strategic shift. Around 70-80% of the long-term space economy is expected to come from space services, not launch. $RKLB has officially entered that game.

The space industry itself is still in its infancy. Every time I read about where this industry is headed, I get more excited about its long-term potential.

Does seeing your portfolio get cut in half hurt? Of course it does. I'm not enjoying it either. But that's how growth investing works. Volatility is the admission fee.

If the market is getting to you emotionally, step away from the screen for a while. Spend time with family and friends. These are numbers on a screen. They go up. They go down.

What matters over time is whether the business keeps executing.

Go look at 10-20 year charts of Tesla, Amazon, Microsoft, or Meta. They've all had multiple 50%+ drawdowns. Looking back today, those crashes barely register because the businesses kept compounding.

The hardest companies to own are the ones trying to create entirely new markets. That's also why not everyone gets wealthy investing. It takes research, patience, and conviction to hold through the periods when almost everyone else has given up.

AI and space are still in the early innings. They'll likely go through multiple booms, busts, and bubbles before they mature.

Mature industries rarely produce life-changing returns because their future is already largely priced in. The biggest asymmetric returns usually come from disruptive technologies before they're widely understood.

Commercial aviation created enormous wealth in its early decades. Today, it's a mature industry. Very few people buy airline stocks expecting extraordinary returns.

Space is different.

Reusable rockets are still new. Direct-to-cell satellite connectivity is new. That's just one application. There will likely be hundreds, maybe thousands, of space-based applications that haven't even been imagined yet.

As for today, a pullback after such an aggressive sector-wide run was never surprising. Markets don't move in straight lines. They surge, they cool off, they consolidate, and then eventually they find their next direction.

Following is the 5-year chart of $RKLB, and red circles show a 40-50% drop in stock prices. Imagine if investors had sold there?

[Emperor Notes @Emp_Notes]

@StockMKTNewz $NBIS is the worst performing today. But, still my best performing ever. Go figure.

[Shay Boloor @StockSavvyShay]

$RKLB is set to gain Iridium’s PNT chip which moved to commercial availability today and delivers authenticated LEO positioning and timing signals ~1,000x stronger than GPS.

The technology already has interest from more than 150 organizations.

[Emperor Notes @Emp_Notes]

@StockMKTNewz 73.

[M. V. Cunha @mvcinvesting]

Trump comes to the rescue of data center stocks.

[Emperor Notes @Emp_Notes]

One can only keep getting schooled by this man. For free.

[Paper Gains @PaperGainsInc]

OMFG I'm about to blow a gasket over this $IBM coverage.

Peak bearish sentiment here for sure! But I can't stand analyst after analyst calling $IBM a software miss. Every time I turn on CNBC today, it's making me sick.

If you think $IBM is a software miss, I don't think you're qualified to have an opinion...

This isn't a product or demand problem.

Software grew 5%... their only segment that grew at all!

What's actually happening??

This is a cultural, structural smoke show FINALLY unraveling after 25 years of circus acts.

The stock would've been down years ago if it wasn't propped up by financial engineering. Revenue peaked at $107 billion in 2011, followed by 22 straight quarters of decline.

Think about it... Per their CEO:

Clients spent the last weeks of June stampeding into servers, storage, and memory to front-run price hikes. A once-in-a-decade hardware panic-buy.

Did you know $IBM sells all this gear?

Storage Scale systems for AI pipelines, Power servers, a resell channel. Yet... nothing. Infrastructure fell 7%.

I don't even know if they swung the bat. But they DID get an at bat.

They spent the money to build the gear. Does anyone even know they have it? What kind of miss is that? What do you call that? Cultural? Structural? Go-to-market?

Also, they have a huge security footprint that should have been able to do SOMETHING in the biggest security spending boom ever. Their answer? Sell QRadar, their best security asset, to a competitor.

Admittedly... this post is harsh. Maybe a bit over the top. Maybe this marks the bottom. But I literally lived this.

I sold enterprise infrastructure in Silicon Valley for years against these guys. Even tried to help them out a time or two. The reputational rot is insurmountable, at least with this leadership team and this culture.

I remember getting to the table for IBM, spec'ing out the gear... and just being embarrassed. I couldn't propose it to the customer. Two or three times what it should cost. Sometimes more.

The whole pitch was "we're reliable," "we're Big Blue," "we'll never fail." What the fuck?

This is NOT a product miss. They had the products.

This is a culture story. Failure after failure after failure, covered up by financial engineering.

They promised Wall Street $20 EPS and bought back over $100 billion of stock to manufacture it. Share count cut roughly in half. Roadmap quietly abandoned when the math ran out.

I don't blame people for thinking it's worth a shot. Even Buffett took a shot... before he sold and admitted he was wrong.

If nothing changes, nothing changes.

Expecting a different result from the same culture is literally the definition of insanity.

Watching analysts reduce all of this to a software miss is nauseating.

Is IBM going bankrupt? I don't know.

But if this team stays and this culture remains... I'd put money on it.

[Not Jerome Powell @alifarhat79]

Trump: I’m bombing Iran. I’m not bombing Iran. I’m bombing Iran. I’m not bombing Iran.

Markets:

[Emperor Notes @Emp_Notes]

@PaperGainsInc One can only laugh and ride the tide…

[Paper Gains @PaperGainsInc]

Happy Tuesday 🌮

TRUMP: STRAIT OF HORMUZ OPEN TO ALL SHIP TRAFFIC EXCEPT IRAN

TRUMP: REPLACE 20% US REIMBURSEMENT FEE WITH MASSIVE TRADE AND INVESTMENT DEALS FROM GULF STATES

[Emperor Notes @Emp_Notes]

@PaperGainsInc IBM's decline isn't a bellwether for the broader software sector, it’s a self-inflicted result of uncompetitive pricing and poor demand forecasting. A classic case of blaming "the market" for bad management.

[NoLimit @NoLimitGains]

Argentina's Peso is officially worthless.

[The Kobeissi Letter @KobeissiLetter]

BREAKING: IBM stock, $IBM, collapses nearly -20% after posting weaker than expected earnings due to “weakness in the software and infrastructure business.”

The stock just erased -$55 billion in market cap.

[JaguarAnalytics @JaguarAnalytics]

Mr. President. Just letting you know in case none of your advisors told you this. You keep this war going, the US will be paying 5% interest on the 10-year at a time job growth is slowing and massive data center spending is all financed. And to what end ??

[Rosanna Prestia, MBA @RosannaInvests]

I mapped the entire future economy. Nine layers, from bedrock to orbit → and every layer is investable.

🛰️ SPACE → the orbital economy: $ASTS $RKLB $PL
⚡ ENERGY & STORAGE → powering the buildout: $TE $EOSE $SPKL
🚁 AUTONOMY & DRONES → machines that operate themselves: $ONDS $AUR $MRLN $KRKNF
🤖 PHYSICAL AI → intelligence that acts: $OUST $AMBA $OSS
💡 PHOTONICS → light replaces copper: $CRDO $SIVEF $AAOI $LITE
🏗️ AI INFRASTRUCTURE → the compute buildout: $IREN $NBIS $DGXX $WYFI
🔬 GLASS & OPTICAL MATERIALS → the substrate light runs on: $GLW $LPTH $LPKF
📡 CONNECTIVITY & RF → moving the signal: $AMPG
⛏️ CRITICAL MINERALS → the hard constraints under everything: $MP $UAMY $ASPI

Here's what the map teaches that a watchlist can't: these aren't nine separate trades. They're one machine → the minerals feed the glass, the glass carries the light, the light feeds the compute, the compute powers the intelligence, the intelligence drives the machines, and the machines reach for orbit. Every layer is a chokepoint for the one above it.

Which is the entire investing philosophy in one image: don't chase the logo at the top of the stack → own the layers everything above is FORCED to buy from. Logos compete. Layers collect.

Important note: a map is a thesis, not a timing tool → layers de-rate together when the factor gets sold (see: this month), and not every name survives to see its layer win. Diversification across a stack is still one machine.

The future economy isn't a sector. It's a supply chain → and it's hiring.